


someone will remember us

by kirazi



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Canon Compliant, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Helen and Sophos are happily married but there are some Unspoken Feelings between her and the Magus, Missing Scene, Relationship Status: It's Complicated, Requited Unrequited Love, Sort Of, also a lot of feelings about volcanoes and historical memory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirazi/pseuds/kirazi
Summary: In the library of Attolia's palace, Helen mourns her country and contemplates her future. A missing scene from the end ofReturn of the Thief.
Relationships: Eddis | Helen/Sophos, Eddis | Helen/The Magus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	someone will remember us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jonphaedrus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/gifts).



Helen yawns and shifts in the chair, her back aching. It always bothers her in the evenings now, and she’s still annoyed by that. She tugs absently at the folds of her unaccustomed skirts; her trousers stopped staying up a fortnight ago, and it’s another small frustration to bear—the loss of a certain freedom of movement, an ease in her body she’d come to take for granted. She’s too far along to ride, now, or spar with the handful of her guard who survived Leonyla and accompanied her to Attolia’s capitol, or do anything much more than sit and write and argue, and perhaps take a stroll around the gardens or go through the awkward motions of a dance at dinner. So she’s sitting here in the library, the evening light gone slant across the table, while her husband soothes his fractious barons, and her thoughts swoop like mountain swallows through her weary mind.

They are doing good work, making progress every day on the charter that will bind three countries into one—in law and lasting custom, not merely the fragile body of a king. But with each line of the treaty they set down on parchment the awareness grows stronger, like a heartbeat: this is the end of Eddis. Oh, she’ll go back to her court in the mountains before the year is out, show it to the child she’s carrying, see the Hephaestial peaks and valleys once more. But the choice is made now, the future set on its path: in the years to come, her people will trickle downhill like a mountain stream tumbling into a cataract. Their ways and speech will be different from those of the children they’ll have, and her life will finish out in some lowland palace, in a new country she’s helped build. It’s the best ending she could hope for, the one she’s worked tirelessly to make possible ever since she began to dream of the catastrophe that would await them if she were to fail. _I have always known I will be the last Eddis._ It’s only a truth she’s long believed, finally coming face-to-face. But now she feels the full measure of that grief gnaw at her, atop all the others that bite at the edges of her days, in the wake of the victory they’d won at such cost. Her uncle, most of her remaining male cousins, her loyal officers, the flower of the Eddisian guard. Men who’ve taught her and tried her, men she’s trained with and led into battle, all burned on the pyres in the lowland battlefields. And she finds herself wondering what they’ll think of their sacrifice, from the afterlife, once they know what she’s making of it: an end to their world, to the traditions they so fiercely upheld. Slower and gentler than the end the mountain’s fire would have made, but an end nonetheless.

Footsteps fall on the floor behind her, a deliberate tread, and she turns to find the magus pausing between the shelves. She’s not surprised to see him there; only three men might come upon her unannounced, and one of those is fretting impatiently on the border with Roa, while another is talking himself hoarse in a meeting-room halfway across Attolia’s palace. Helen smiles at him, and her heart eases a little as his timeworn, handsome face creases in reply.

“My Queen,” the Magus says, as he’s unfailingly called her since her wedding. He’s refused every invitation to use her personal name; she understands that this is, perhaps, a measure of protection for them both, and respects it, which is why she addresses him in kind.

“Magus,” she says. “Come, sit. Tell me how they’re getting on.”

“Sounis asked me to tell you he’ll be postponed a little longer,” he tells her, pulling out a chair beside hers and seating himself with a quiet little sigh. “I’m afraid Xorcheus and Statidoros are balking again. At a certain point, it became clear my contributions to the discussion were proving undiplomatic, so I pled a headache and was granted my leave.”

Helen rolls her eyes. “It would be undiplomatic to take them out and shoot them, I suppose,” she says, and his answering chuckle brightens the air.

“Gen might think otherwise,” he says, and she’s amused once again that of all the monarchs he’s known, it’s only the annux he refers to with such casual exasperation, as if he’s still seeing an undersized thief whom he’d like to shake down for the ill-gotten contents of his pockets.

Helen sighs. “As much as I miss him, he was right—it’s better he’s not here,” she acknowledges. “There’s no way he’d have kept his temper in there today.”

The magus nods, agreeing in that customary way they have—so many of their conversations take place outside of spoken words. It’s a comfort to have him near again. He’s been an anchor for her ever since the days of his captivity in her mountains, her sounding board and company during the last war, and the early months of the peace that followed. Her friend.

“That said, I believe my king will not need a handgun to bring them around this time,” he says. “When I left, he was making good progress, and his father, too, was helping rather than hindering, for once.” His pride in Sophos is obvious, if perhaps somewhat indulgent, given his hand in molding the man to whom she chose to give her own. She’s glad for that.

“I think I was hindering more than helping myself, with Statidoros anyway. What a tiresome boor that man is; he can’t bear to hear a woman speak about politics. Do you think I ought to rejoin them?” she asks, grimacing as she shifts position again, and he catches it.

“You’re tired,” he observes. Helen dismisses the objection with a wave of her hand—her discomfort is irrelevant, not least with Irene’s determined efforts at much further along. It makes Helen’s hips hurt just to look at her, and Galen and Petrus have begun to suspect she may be carrying twins. No one has decided yet whether or not it would be prudent to inform Eugenides of that suspicion.

“In any case, I think it is better they sort this out among themselves,” the magus continues. “Sounis’s barons regard the question of estates as an internal matter.”

“Such distinctions will be moot, if we succeed,” she says. They’ve carved out some latitude for local variation in custom, but the code of laws in the treaty are meant to apply equally to all the people of the Little Peninsula.

“We will,” he assures her, and his blunt confidence makes her laugh out loud.

“Gen said it himself: you were born for this. You’ve been indispensable.” He shakes his head, demurring, but she means it, truly: he’s helped steer the negotiations over difficult terrain, brought to bear arguments historical and legal and geographical, ensured over and over again that the treaty they are making will hold sound. “Truly,” she repeats herself. “We could not have done this without you.”

“It’s what I’ve fought for all this time,” he says quietly, lifting his gaze to the shelves and the windows beyond. “For my country, yes, but Sounis has no future without Eddis, without Attolia. I told Gen as much when I thought he was still a thief from the gutter: we had to face the Medes united, or fall. The history of this land made that conclusion inevitable. And one victory will not secure the future. The Medes will be back one day, or the Continent before them. What the four of you, and all those who fought and died in these wars, have gained is the hope of outlasting them. And the measures you are taking now—the land grants, the trade policies—they will do what your marriages alone could not. In twenty years, it will seem unimaginable that there could be war between Sounis and Eddis again. People won’t even think of them as separate countries by then.”

“Yes,” Helen says, but even as she’s saying it that tide of grief wells up in her again, closing her throat, and she’s dismayed to feel her eyes burning. It’s not lost on her that at some point in the past few years, he’s gained the habit of pronouncing Eddis correctly.

“My Queen?” the magus asks her, shifting closer, first, and then holding himself back, as if uncertain whether or not to touch her. She feels a sudden an uncharacteristic desire to fling herself at him and sob into his shoulder; she can feel, as if it’s happening, how solid the warmth of his arms would be. Steady and grounding, a rock like the mountains she misses so dearly.

“I know why I’m doing this,” she tells him, her voice little more then a whisper, and it all comes pouring out: her visions of the eruption, the tide of fire and mud pouring over her city, the ruin left in its wake. At first, she worries he’ll dismiss her—like any natural scientist, he’s suspicious of gods and oracles and dreams that are more than just dreams—but perhaps enough time in Gen’s company has taught him something after all, because he listens with a sort of grave regard, the lines in his face deepening. He understands, of course; he’s always understood: her fellow orphan, her fellow plague-survivor. They share a bond forged in that loss that Sophos, with his living family, cannot understand.

“I know it’s the right thing. It’s what you said: I’ve bought them a future,” she says, finally. “But at what price? Who will they be, two generations from now, or three? Who will remember what we were?” Her throat aches with the weight of those questions, and she’s startled when he takes her hand and presses his lips to her knuckles, a fleeting warmth, before releasing her fingers.

“You’ll tell your children the old stories,” he says. “And we will set them down in words. It is the way of societies to change, but a people can remember. That’s what history is for, Helen.”

She laughs though a sob, and brings her hands to her face, scrubs at her stinging eyes. A deep breath, and then another, and her fractured balance comes back to her.

“Gen told me, you know, who it was that sent Irene to me the day Sophos left here to go claim his throne.” She thinks about that moment, again, the thunderbolt to her heart. “You always know what I need,” she says softly. “Thank you, Nikos.”

He is still for a moment, nothing moving between them but the motes of dust caught in the waning daylight, shining bright. “I am grateful you married him, and not his uncle,” he says, at last.

“So am I,” she tells him, and means it. There are so many things to be grateful for, she thinks. Even now. She feels the child stir, for the first time since the morning, and her hand chases the ripple of motion across her belly, a soothing reflex.

“Helen?” She turns her head, hearing her husband’s voice echo through the library, this place where she watched him in her dreams. He comes around the shelves and sees them seated there, and the sheepish, scarred smile that still makes her heart shudder in her chest steals across his features, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “There you are,” he says—his gladness to see them both evident on his face. He’s never begrudged her this, never questioned the quiet companionship she’s shared with his mentor, and she loves him all the more for it.

Sophos winds around to the table and bends to kiss her brow, soft, and rests a hand briefly on the magus’s shoulder. “We’re done,” he says, “for today, anyway. I think we got somewhere in the end. And I don’t think I can bear another minute of the company of any member of my court right now—save the two of you. Will you dine with us in our rooms, magus?”

Helen looks at the two of them as the magus stands, waiting for her to join, and the ache in her chest lessens. She feels the soft judder of the child moving inside her again and thinks: _this is your family._ It’s missing so many people, now, but we’ll tell you who they were, and you’ll hear their stories, and know the right way to say their names. _It will be so, it will be so, it will be so._

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, jonphaedrus! I hope you enjoy this. It's not quite the kiss you asked for—as much as I like a good OT3, I couldn't make it work here—but I love these three a whole lot, and believe they share a deep and abiding bond even if it's not fully consummated (and if you want to read this as a prequel to future developments of that kind, be my guest). This story ended up taking a different tack in part because I'm fascinated by what the series gradually reveals of Helen's relationship to Eddis, and wondered what it must feel like for her to achieve such a catastrophic victory—saving her people, while in some sense realizing that success means the end of their way of life and their identity.
> 
> Title from Sappho (by way of Anne Carson), because I'm that kind of dork. And I am not up to speed with fandom speculations on the matter, but I've decided [Hellanikos of Lesbos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellanicus_of_Lesbos) is a worthy namesake for the Magus.


End file.
